- What is Community Engagement?
- About us
- Past Initiatives
- COVID-19 Community Resilience Network
- Network reflections and recaps
- February 3-5, 2021 – Presenting at the 2021 International University Social Responsibility (USR) Summit
- December 2nd - SFU’s role in transformational change
- November 25 - Addressing the issue of women academics falling behind
- November 18 – the colonial nature of current systems of research and evaluation
- November 4 - Precarious instructors in the post-pandemic academy
- October 28 – A conversation with Happy City about building back "Main Street"
- October 14 – What's at stake in BC's upcoming election? A conversation with Frances Bula
- October 7 – Hosted dialogues
- September 30 – Radical inclusion with Ele Chenier
- September 23 – Hosted dialogues
- September 16 – Antifragility and resilience
- Community-university response to COVID-19
- Network reflections and recaps
- Canadian Pilot Cohort of the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification
- COVID-19 Community Resilience Network
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October 7 – Hosted dialogues
By Methuseli Dube
This week we discussed two main topics, hosted by two participants from our network. Instead of breaking into two separate discussions, we all participated in each discussion, one after the other. This blog post will offer a brief overview of the discussion and resources shared throughout the dialogue. Thank you to everyone who attended!
Governments and complexity
Facilitated by Linda Peritz, Social Innovator
As citizens, it is our responsibility to have realistic expectations of our elected officials. Do our expectations match the complexity of these times? Have our elected officials stopped offering simple solutions and promises they can’t keep? How can our democracies thrive in response to the pandemic?
Post-pandemic: lessons learned or lessons forgotten?
Facilitated by Laurie Anderson, Executive Director, SFU's Vancouver campus.
In what way does the pandemic also offer opportunities for societal renewal? What needs to change? What should remain in place?
Recap, notes and resources
Memorable quotes:
“Complex problems” is an oxymoron. If it’s a problem, it’s solvable, so it pretty much can’t be complex. If it’s complex, it’s not a problem to be “solved”.
#Resources:
- COVID-19 Community Resilience Network Zoom call slide deck: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H-NEOw1-qj4Nl_nbBN-YAe2ZtsVMCD4Q/view?usp=sharing
- An interesting graph showing the relationship between scale and complexity, from Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of New England Complex Systems Institute and an MIT- trained physicist and complexity scientist. He has been thinking about global pandemics for 15 years: https://twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/1211286402375262214
- Link to Borgen, a gripping three-season Danish political drama taking a behind-the-camera look at politics: https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/70302482.
- The Administration of Fear by Paul Virilio, addresses the ways in which technology is utilized in synchronizing mass emotions: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/administration-fear
- A great podcast on US leadership absence from the global community: https://crooked.com/podcast-series/pod-save-america/
- Identifying and resolving conflict-of-interest situations is crucial to good governance and maintaining trust in public institutions. However, experience shows that this can be difficult to achieve in daily practice: This toolkit, made by the OECD, offers possible solutions for managing conflicts of interest: https://www.oecd.org/gov/ethics/49107986.pdf
- An interesting article discussing inequality and the pandemic, examining where we can go from here: https://www.un.org/africarenewal/web-features/%E2%80%9Ctackling-inequality-pandemic-new-social-contract-new-era%E2%80%9D